Animation shows how Asiana Flight 214 crashed

The National Transportation Safety Board releases an animation from the
cockpit of Asiana flight 214 showing the pilot's decisions that led to the
crash

10:48AM BST 25 Jun 2014

A "mismanaged" approach for landing in a highly automated cockpit was the probable cause of last July's crash of a South Korean airliner in San Francisco, US investigators said on Tuesday.

Three young Chinese citizens died and 182 people suffered injuries when Asiana Flight 214 from Seoul clipped a sea wall with its landing gear, then crashed and burst into flames, in the first commercial airliner disaster in the United States since 2009.

"In this investigation, we have learned that pilots must understand and command automation, and not become over-reliant on it," said acting chairman Christopher Hart of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).

"The pilot must always be the boss," added Mr Hart, a licensed pilot himself, at the end of a day-long NTSB hearing that concluded the federal agency's probe into the July 6, 2013 disaster.

While the Boeing 777 was in the hands of "a seasoned flight crew with a good safety record, they misunderstood the automated systems at their command," Mr Hart said.

The NTSB released an animation of the plane's controls showing how decisions made by the captain and first officer led to the aircraft missing the runway and crashing.

The board, which never explicitly assigns blame, cited a long and varied list of contributing factors, from the Boeing 777's automated throttle system to pilot fatigue and jet lag after an otherwise routine 10-1/2 hour trans-Pacific hop.

Investigators testified that captain Lee Kang-Kuk, a seasoned Airbus A320 pilot moving to the bigger Boeing 777, cut the autopilot on final approach into San Francisco, where the instrument landing system was out of service on a clear sunny day.

Doing so put the auto-throttle on hold, meaning it would no longer automatically control airspeed and failed to deliver an expected burst of engine power that would have enabled the airliner to make the runway.